I recently listened to a “tech” podcast host drone on for 45 minutes about the “Elon vs Zuck” cage match and this piece perfectly captures the frothing, screaming stream-of-conciousness in my brain at the thought of seeing another discussion about Twitter vs Threads/Insta/Face/burning-sh*itpile. I felt some small amount of catharsis just from reading.

  • Feanor@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    “a half-baked Mastodon instance Frankenstein-stitched to the rib of Instagram” Nothing to add just a brilliant quote

  • audaxdreik@pawb.social
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    1 year ago

    Love Catherynne M. Valente, amazing author. Check out her work if you haven’t already; I’m partial to her collection of short stories, The Melancholy of Mechagirl

    • distractedcactus@beehaw.orgOP
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      1 year ago

      I just recently found her Substack and devoured most of the public posts. I haven’t gotten any of her books yet, but she’s on my list the next time I go into a bookstore. Are there any of her other works that you’d recommend?

      • audaxdreik@pawb.social
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        1 year ago

        I’m a sucker for short story compilations so I would also highly recommend The Future Is Blue.

        I haven’t gotten around to reading it yet, but Space Opera is also sitting on my shelf collecting dust. I’ve heard it described as “Eurovision in space”

  • trashhalo@beehaw.org
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    Key moments pulled from kagi.com

    • The author is upset and suspicious of Mark Zuckerberg and his new social media platform Threads.

    • The author believes Zuckerberg is not to be trusted given Facebook’s history of data harvesting, privacy violations, and spreading misinformation.

    • Facebook bears responsibility for spreading conspiracy theories and radicalizing people.

    • The author thinks the positive reception of Threads is likely due to astroturfing and artificial boosting by Zuckerberg.

    • Zuckerberg has a long history of unethical behavior and putting profits over people.

    • The author worries that Threads will be used to manipulate the 2024 election and spread misinformation.

    • The author thinks people are too easily falling for Zuckerberg’s rebranding as a “cool uncle” figure with Threads.

    • The author argues that Zuckerberg has not changed and Threads will eventually become just like Facebook.

    • The author warns against trusting Zuckerberg and Threads, comparing it to a panther that seems cool at first but will eventually harm people.

    • The author believes Zuckerberg’s ultimate goal is to control what information people see online.

    • distractedcactus@beehaw.orgOP
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      1 year ago

      That is completely accurate and logical representation of the article after it’s had the heart ripped out KALIMAAA-style and been lowered into a pit.

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      I was about to ask if Kagi is worth paying for, but their website does a tremendous job of selling it. I am going to have to give up a subscription to afford it, but I think it will be worth it. Actually… maybe not. I pay for everything annually when I can. Too bad they don’t have that option, but it makes sense when their are hard limits to searches and features between tiers.

    • HughJanus
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      Generally I appreciate these sorts of posts but in this case, this is extrapolating the facts and leaving out literally everything that makes this article great. Please delete it.

  • echo@sopuli.xyz
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    1 year ago

    I’m glad I’m apparently not online enough to have any idea what she’s pissed off about

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      Twitter had an outage at the same time Threads: An Instagram App was launching. Threads now has something like 100 million accounts in a matter of days.

      So apparently lots of people and businesses are replacing Twitter with Threads. It’s just over here on Lemmy, most of us seem to be Reddit refugees. There is a lot of discussion about Threads federation via ActivityPub (if you are on the right communities at least), but otherwise I think we are all mostly just happy to leave all that corporate BS behind.

      • echo@sopuli.xyz
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        1 year ago

        yeah, I know about Threads, I just haven’t seen any of this zuck fanboying that she’s talking about

        • snowbell@beehaw.org
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          I’ve seen a lot of people suggest that Zuck is a more ethical person, which I think is an absolutely ridiculous claim.

          • PostmodernPythia@beehaw.org
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            1 year ago

            Yep. The difference is emotional, not material. Zuck, like most billionaires, seems happy to sleep on his pile of Scrooge McDuck money and fuck people over. Muskrat does all that, but he asks something more of us than our money and our lives. He wants, maybe even needs, us to love and respect him while he does it. And that sets rage-fires in the brain-parts.

            • qprimed
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              dime store tony stark wannabe.

    • HughJanus
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      1 year ago

      Not that complicated. Elon bought and promptly fucked Twitter. Zuck spun up a Twitter clone. People are praising him for it despite his decrepit history of being a shite person.

  • Zrybew
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    1 year ago

    “Zuckerberg sucks so much just the rookie phase of his assholery justified a major motion picture to lay out just how dedicated he was to sucking as hard as possible.”

    This 👆🏻

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    1 year ago

    damn, that was a soul-ripping read. please share widely.

  • Newtra
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    I’m all for hating on Musk, and Meta’s hellscape of social networks and privacy violations, but when you take a step away from the capitalist front, Meta and Zuckerberg haven’t been as evil as the likes of Tesla, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, etc. Sure, he’s in a bad bunch, but IMO he’s the least bad human being in the billionaire celebrities club.

    Meta’s open-sourcing has greatly changed my life for the better: React, PyTorch, Zstandard, Yarn, etc are joys to work with compared to their competitors. LLaMA and No Language Left Behind have been huge developments in the AI world - released without trying to profit from them. The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative funds great science and even almost funded one of my projects.

    For contrast, Apple, Amazon and Tesla barely open-source anything, and a lot of Google’s open source stuff is garbage. Bill Gates eventually turned to charity after retiring from utterly ruining the PC software market, Bezos claims he plans to give his fortune away eventually, but Zuckerberg started being charitable way earlier than those guys.

    I’m all for burning down capitalism and social networks and billionaires, but not all bad things are the same level of bad.

    • HughJanus
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      LLaMA and No Language Left Behind have been huge developments in the AI world - released without trying to profit from them.

      You’re delusional if you really believe that. They’re entirely planning to profit from them. They just need more developers to do it because it’s a monumental task.

      The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative funds great science and even almost funded one of my projects.

      Yeah and Bill Gates did all kinds of objectively great philanthropy but he made that money by fucking consumers repeatedly for decades.

      • Newtra
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        They’re entirely planning to profit from them.

        What I mean is that they didn’t try to profit from their open-sourcing. They didn’t lock them behind an API or charge a licensing fee like other AI companies.

        Absolutely they’ll profit from having these models, but open-sourcing them actually gave some advantage to their competitors & the general public.

        Yeah and Bill Gates did all kinds of objectively great philanthropy but he made that money by fucking consumers repeatedly for decades.

        The difference is timing. Bill Gates only started thinking about the impact he made on the world after he completely fucked us. He’s trying to repent and just fix his reputation after the fact. Zuckerberg started trying to fix the world while relatively early into the fucking. It’s as if he realizes the harm and is trying to offset it.

  • HughJanus
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    1 year ago

    This is some brilliant writing. I really want to listen to Lewis Black read this.